SampleTank 3 Needed anymore

[fret_man]

I'm trying to save some disk space and noticed SampleTank 3 & 4 both take up about 200GB. I used to use ST3 to load up some of the old ST2.5 sounds - the old SampleTron and eSoundz. If I no longer need those, and I don't have ST3 sounds in any project files (they I know of), is there any reason to keep ST3 installed?

Thanks for your opinions.

[User 905133]

Just last night, I uninstalled ST3 (and all my other IK Instruments/Tools) but for a different reason. (ST3 plays different ranges of the keyboard with different levels of loudness. Syntronik and MP2 didn't have this issue.) 

So, although, I have no opinion on your issue, I'd be very interested in suggestions for removing all the sounds and the sound packs/expansions.  (Apologies if this if off-topic, but I did think it was related because if you remove IK GBs, I'd be interested in knowing the best way(s) to do it.)

 

[abacab]

Many of the ST3 sounds are not duplicated in ST4, but are available and used in ST4. So you may not want to remove the ST3 libraries path for that reason.

You don't need the old application anymore, but that really doesn't use all that much space.

ST3 here uses 135MB in Program Files and 217KB for the plugin .dll.

Edited January 24, 2022 by abacab

[NOLAGuy]

One minor comment... I have both ST3 and ST4 installed. Several past Cakewalk projects were set to use ST3 and I initially had problems getting ST4 to work right in Cakewalk. As I open those older projects to tinker with newer plugins and such, I do notice that ST3 is not as CPU intensive as ST4. Substituting ST4 in place of ST3 produced a notable spike on the processing meter.

So since I think many sounds in ST4 when used "vanilla", are basically modified ST3 sounds, and I typically can't tell the diffence in a mix, so if CPU load is an issue on your projects, using ST3 with it's sound library may help.

[abacab]

8 hours ago, NOLAGuy said:

So since I think many sounds in ST4 when used "vanilla", are basically modified ST3 sounds, and I typically can't tell the diffence in a mix, so if CPU load is an issue on your projects, using ST3 with it's sound library may help.

That is a good suggestion. I always ran into issues using ST4 as a "multi" instrument. The load went up drastically. ST3 is definitely lighter.

Just be aware that many of the instruments in ST4 are newly sampled, and not available in ST3. I have ST4 MAX, and the ST4 exclusives as represented in the IK sound list documentation are the majority of the new ST4 library.

In this case, I only load 1 or 2 instruments into an instance of ST4. Each instance of ST4 should get it's own core on your CPU (obviously DAW dependent case here).

Edited February 11, 2022 by abacab

[abacab]

I played around and setup 2 CbB projects, one with 1 instance of ST4 using 6 instruments, and the other using 6 instances of ST4, each with 1 instrument.

It took more memory to run 6 instances of ST4, but I had more balanced CPU core utilization that way. With only one instance of ST4 running all 6 instruments, I had a single CPU core bearing most of the work. In my experience, once a single core goes much above 50%, there is a higher risk of dropouts.

 

[NOLAGuy]

 Nice analysis!  Since I have an older CPU, and I use ST4 with a MIDI track, I find the sound I want, tweak it as needed, and just create a WAV file for that track and "import" the WAV file into a track for further mix processing. Since I now use the full version of iZotope's Nectar3 for vocals, that consumes a lot of my available CPU, I ususally need to work on the instrumentals seperately in a seperate project and create a "mix" track which I transfer into the vocal project. Takes extra time and not ideal, but I'm a hobbyist and have plenty of time to spend on a project.